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Methods, Disciplines and Social Change
This strand investigates how the disciplinary methods and procedures of a range of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) disciplines function as agents of social change. The questions asked and the manner in which they are pursued build on recent approaches to the analysis of knowledge practices which stress their 'world making' and 'world changing' capacities. These approaches consider knowledge practices not as purely intellectual activities but rather stress the respects in which their pursuit is tangled up in a range of social and material processes. They emphasise how the production of new truths, and of new ways of knowing, often produce new kinds of social actors - new kinds of experts, new policy and advisory agencies - which fashion those truths and methods into new instruments for acting on social worlds in order to change them.
In one influential formulation, knowledges are best interpreted as 'method assemblages': that is, as combinations of specific knowledge instruments, forms of training, and techniques and styles of thought that are brought together in specific institutions and apparatuses, to provide ways of knowing the world that are also means of acting on it. There is no shortage of examples of such 'method assemblages': the battery of agencies and statistical techniques that are involved in the management of contemporary economies; the role of architects and planners in the organisation of urban spaces; the range of different knowledges (ethnographic, historical, design) informing the selection and management of cultural heritage sites; the use of general population and audience surveys in the development of arts, cultural and sports policies; and the complex relations between anthropological expertise and Indigenous knowledge practices that have been involved, post-Mabo, in the adjudication of land claims.
